More on Breaking into Appellate Law, from a Sole Practitioner Appellate Lawyer Friend of Mine:

This is from Bruce Adelstein, who worked for a few years for Horvitz & Levy in L.A., and is now out on his own. He’s a very smart guy, a smart lawyer and also someone smart enough to have snapped up the appellatelaw.com domain when the snapping was good. In any case, here’s his report:

There is the high-end Supreme Court practice. I don’t know much about this, but the people there usually went to great schools, clerked for the USSC, and often went through the SG’s office.

There are appellate departments at large national firms. I think this work is pretty competive and the work is often limited. A lot of big-firm partners are more than competent and very comfortable doing their own appeals. For this reason, big firms have to attract appeals from outside the firm.

The problem is that an appellee or respondent is probably satisfied with their current counsel and is not likely to look to other firms. An appellant might be dissatisfied with its trial counsel. But if the counsel is at another big firm, the firm probably has some pretty capable appellate lawyers. And if the client did not hire a big firm in the first place, it might be that the client does not want to pay big-firm rates. Some big firms have very successful appellate departments, but many have very small appellate departments that don’t do much beyond assisting other lawyers in the firm with appeals.

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